Authorities stopped searching for adventure pilot Steve Fossett after a hiker found the man’s pilot license and some other ID documents.

More than a year after Fosset went missing, a hiker found two of the adventurer’s identification documents as well as 10 muddy $100 bills near Yosemite National Park on Monday. The famous aviator disappeared on September 3, 2007. The billionaire adventurer was flying a stunt plane from Nevada and he was alone.

The hiker, Preston Morrow of Mammoth Lakes, said that he first thought that he found another hiker’s or backpacker's stuff, The Associated Press reported. The 43-year-old hiker was roaming with his dog near Minaret Lake, between Mammoth Lakes and the eastern boundary of Yosemite.

Authorities spotted a plane wreck from a search plane and had planned to send a ground crew to search the region today. They are currently in the field, but will stay put until the snow storm that hit the region calms down.

"Whatever we do, we've got to do it tomorrow," said Madera County Sheriff John Anderson according to The Los Angeles Times.

Authorities confirmed that the hiker found Fosset’s pilot's license and a membership card in the Soaring Society of America. There was also a membership card in an aeronautics association, but the document was too damaged to be identified.

"The certificate number and date of issue on the document in the photo matches the information we have for Mr. Fossett in our database," said a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Los Angeles.

During the past year, the search for the 63-year-old billionaire spanned about 24,000 square miles. The man’s body wasn’t found yet, nor the fuselage of the single-engine Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon.  The adventurer didn’t have a parachute on board the two-seater plane, which is frequently used in air shows for acrobatic maneuvers.

James Stephen Fossett became famous and cheered across the world for his staggering records. He managed to become the first person to single-handedly fly a balloon (2002) and airplane (2005) around the globe without any intermediate landings or refueling.

In 2006, he set a new record for “distance without landing” after 76 hours and 43 minutes of dramatic flight across 41,467 kilometers. He took off in his ultra-light plane the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer from Florida and flew over the Atlantic twice before landing in a tourist resort on the south coast of England.

As an aviator, pilot and adventurer, the Californian broke and set over 100 world records, half of them still ruling the statistics.

Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 9,000-meter (29,000-foot) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon.
In another incident he managed to walk for almost 50 kilometers and get help after making an emergency landing.